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Giant launches itself into B2B e-bike sharing

The world’s biggest bicycle manufacturer, Taiwanese Giant, is launching itself into B2B e-bike sharing in the Netherlands and Belgium and wants to deploy 21.000 e-bikes by 2021 /ConnectBlue

Giant, the world’s biggest bicycle manufacturer, is launching itself into the B2B e-bike sharing market in the Netherlands and Belgium. Together with Dutch scale-up E-bike2work and partners Mobiloc and Allianz Insurance, it wants to deploy 21.000 shared e-bikes by 2021 with a service called ‘ConnectBlue’.

Giant Manufacturing Co Ltd is a Taiwanese company with production facilities in Taiwan, the Netherlands (Lelystad) and China. In Europe alone it sells around 400.000 bicycles yearly with a growing percentage of e-bikes.

Unlocked by smartphone

For the ConnectBlue shared e-bikes it developed together with hard- and software specialist Mobiloc a special electric bike that can be unlocked by smartphone and is very well suited for delivery services or companies and organizations with shared e-bike systems or private lease solutions for their employees.

ConnectBlue delivers a full service with reservation and unlocking of the bikes by smartphone, which can easily be integrated into existing sharing systems, the company claims. The bikes are fully insured and come with breakdown assistance guaranteed within 120 minutes.

300.000 B2B e-bikes

The service has started testing already on the campus of the Technical University Delft with 400 users, and in Amsterdam where ConnectBike will deploy 70 e-bikes to start with at the Ajax Johan Cruijff Arena.

The following months similar projects are to be launched in several cities in the Netherlands and Belgium, aiming at a fleet of 21.000 shared e-bikes by 2021.

Giant estimates there will be around 300.000 B2B e-bikes in use in the Benelux by 2022, of which 120.000 will be used by delivery services that are switching from vans and scooters to e-bikes more and more. So there is still room for growth, the Taiwanese think.